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Baulch, Emma (2017) The everyman and the dung beetle: New media infrastructures for lower- class cultural politics. Cultural Politics, 13(2), pp. 202-226.
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Author bio: Emma Baulch is a Senior Research Fellow at the Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology. She has written extensively about Indonesian popular music and is the author of Making Scenes (Duke UP, 2007). This article is based on research undertaken as part of ‘Mobile Indonesians: Digital literacies and social differentiation in the 21st century’, funded by the Australian Research Council. [email protected]
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1 The everyman and the dung beetle: new media infrastructures for lower class cultural politics
Abstract Noting the increasing tendency of Indonesian pop performers to organize and agitate politically, the article aims to locate these celebrity politics in a history of post‐Fordist media change, and to explore their implications for lower class collective organizing. Through a discussion of two pop performances that explicitly address the lower classes – the Jakarta‐based rock band Slank and the Balinese solo performer, Nanoe Biroe – I trace the increasing recognition of pop idols as politically authoritative figures, and the emergence of a new form of corporatized associational life (the fan group) as a site for attending to that authority. I argue, these developments in public culture can be linked to changes to the media environment since the end of the Cold War, which include but are not limited to widespread digital uptake. The article engages work investigating prospects for critical forms of belonging within a neo‐liberal communicative environment– especially Dean’s writings on communicative capitalism. It examines the vulnerabilities and possibilities of lower class performances and solidarities, and brings to light the broader media infrastructures that enable them.
Keywords: Indonesia, media change, digital technologies, communicative capitalism, consumerism
In the 2014 Indonesian Presidential elections, popular music played an important role in the campaign of the victorious candidate, Djoko Widodo (Djokowi), revealing the new ways in which pop performers and their fans are now implicated in political life. For example, during his campaign, Djokowi courted the well‐established rock band, Slank, to publicly support his presidential candidature. He made two much publicized visits to Slank’s headquarters in Pencil Street, Jakarta. One in May to attend an event at which Slank announced they had officially thrown their support behind Djokowi (Fans 2014). At this ramshackle gathering the candidate qualified that Slank epitomized the so‐called ‘mental revolution’ at the core of his campaign pitch, the meaning of which, according to some observers, remained rather elusive. Djokowi made a third visit to the band’s headquarters after casting his vote on election day, to pose for a shoot with the band’s members, hoping, perhaps, that the image may woo a crucial segment of undecided voters to cast their ballot for him (Tiba Tiba 2014).
The 2014 presidential election campaign was widely considered a watershed moment in the history of post‐authoritarian governance in Indonesia, because it pitted Jokowi, a former furniture businessman with no military background, against Prabowo Subianto, a disgraced general credited with masterminding the disappearance of activists in the 1990s. Prabowo promised the return Indonesia to its pre‐democratic constitution, and Jokowi sought to play up his democratic credentials, which starkly contrasted his rival’s dark past and regressive vision. As mayor of a provincial capital, Solo, and then as governor of Jakarta, Jokowi had
2 introduced free education and health regimes for the poor, and pledged to apply that system nationwide if he were to win the presidency (McRae 2014; Wingo 2014).
While the policy details of Jokowi’s campaign has been widely discussed by other scholars, the prominent role Slank played in it has received much less attention. Djokowi’s reliance on Slank for articulating his key campaign message points to new developments in pop celebrities’ involvement in election campaigns. Celebrities have been performing in service of candidates and parties since the 1971 elections, and they continued their roles in elections well into the post‐authoritarian era, albeit in a more deregulated manner, as various campaign teams contracted artists to perform at electoral rallies, without necessarily eliciting these artists’ endorsement (Lindsay, 2005). In both cases, pop idols served as contracted bards who serenaded either entire campaigns or individual rallies. But Slank’s role in the 2014 Presidential campaign was different and suggests the increasingly disaggregated nature of celebrity involvement in election campaigns. In particular, I shall argue here, it suggests that pop idols are increasingly playing roles as independent intellectuals, whose power over language equips them with the ability to herald publics constituted by fan‐voters. Rather than contracting these bards to serenade campaign rallies, candidates now need to cite them in order to make their pitch ring through the bodies of voter‐fans.
This development touches on a crucial question within scholarship on pop celebrities and/in politics: does celebrity politics enhance democratic participation or does it suggest its demise? Some scholars argue, as the role of political parties and traditional forms of civic participation shrink, celebrity politics offer consumer‐citizens new ways of engaging politically (Bang 2009, Street, 2004.2012) and to experiment with “alternative forms of virtuous participation” (Wheeler 2012: 408). Others proffer an assessment of celebrity politics as testimony to the death of popular forms of critique and the rise of spectating as a predominant form of political engagement in “post‐democracy” (Crouch 2004; Kellner 2009). I contend that in order to address the question of what celebrities’ involvement in politics suggests about the quality of democracy, we need to first understand the precise forms of celebrity agency at play, and the specific historical conditions that gave rise to those forms of agency. Following Street’s call for “theorisation of celebrity politics….to draw together more directly insights from political science and cultural and media studies” (2012: 352), I advocate examining a longue duree of change to media economies, and the resulting evolution of new ideas about civic virtue, as well as emergent forms of associational life that advanced those ideas and put them into practice.
In this article, I argue that Slank’s endorsement sheds light on a growing recognition of the validity of image‐based idols’ political authority, and the increasing importance to public culture of new forms of associational life (fan groups) coalescing around this authority.
3 Below, I provide evidence of these developments and account for them historically through a discussion not only of Slank but also of the Balinese idol Nanoe Biroe, whose political address is inspired by and resembles that of Slank, and with reference to debates about new forms of belonging in context of the neo‐liberal, information‐abundant communicative environment (Dean 2005, 2014, 2015; Hinson 2014; Herman, Hadlaw and Swiss 2015; Lim 2014). Since both Slank and Nanoe Biroe explicitly herald a lower class audience, I am especially interested in what they suggest of possibilities for lower class organizing in that environment.i
Conceptualising digitally‐equipped consumerism In several works, Dean lays out the features of what she refers to as communicative capitalism. She argues, active participation in the production of information has become central to the extraction of profit, and this provides the illusion of democracy, while erasing communicability: “Instead of engaged debates, instead of contestations employing common terms, points of reference, or demarcated frontiers, we confront a multiplication of resistances and assertions so extensive that it hinders the formation of strong counter‐ hegemonies… capitalism has subsumed communication such that communication does not provide a critical outside” (Dean 2005: 3). Others, however, present a rosier view. In his critique of Dean’s 2014 essay, Hinson evokes the Italian theorist Lazzarato to suggest that the erasure of traditional counter‐hegemonic modes of belonging, such as ‘worker’, promises the genesis of new counter‐hegemonic identities (Hinson 2014). Lim argues that widespread participation in the production of information entails not just the production of words and images and their circulation online, but more fundamentally the reordering of space and time, and that such reordering pries open possibilities for the operation of agency (Lim 2014). Herman, Hadlaw and Swiss point out that active participation in the production of information rests not on a single medium – online social media, for example – but involves ever more complex concatenations of technologies and bodies. They propose that the mobile internet is aptly conceptualised not as a single technology but “an assemblage of multi‐dimensional socio‐technical practices” and posit that: The notion of the assemblage makes understanding the mobile Internet in situ — whether that situation be physical, symbolic or virtual—possible. The materialities and imaginaries of the mobile Internet are fluid and dynamic, and thus their apprehension and analysis must be likewise methodologically open‐ended and plural. Herman, Hadlaw and Swiss 2015: 3
These works guide my analysis of the cultural and political implications of media change in contemporary Indonesia, but also enable me to gain purchase on how the Indonesian case might extend understandings of informational capitalism ensuing from current scholarship. While Dean is keen to identify digital uptake as a significant point of historical rupture, this article locates the spread of mobile internet in context of a longer duree of post‐Cold War media change, in which advertising funded television precipitated both new kinds of lower
4 class address and the ‘subsumption’ of that address. Therefore, the case at hand sheds light on important features of the neo‐liberal communicative environment in much of Asia, where widespread digital uptake came hot on the heels of the mass domestication of television. It’s important to understand the social implications of the post‐Cold War growth of television before leaping to conclusions about the nature and qualities of digital change.
This study links the rise of neo‐liberal consumerism to developments that precede digital uptake: the proliferation of mobile internet reinforces neo‐liberal values, such as flexibility, mobility and individual autonomy, but such values were ushered in earlier, as part of a longer duree of post‐Cold War media change. Follwing Ong (2006) and Castells (2010: xxiv) I conceive of the longue duree of media change discussed here as part of a new ‘post‐ developmental’ technological paradigm that features the deregulation of telecommunications, but also the privatization of television, and that paved the way for the ascendance of consumerism as a dominant ideology.
As the Slank case shows, neo‐liberal hegemony is attained through the foregrounding of assemblages of commodities, including motorbikes, mobile phones, telco networks and instant noodles, that showcase neo‐liberal values in powerful depictions of the public sphere. Nevertheless, as the Nanoe Biroe case shows, these assemblages are not solely the property of the dominant. They can also be harnessed to motivate an agile spatial politics that abrade the dominant. Mobile messaging, pop idols’ merchandise, and motorbikes allow Nanoe Biroe’s fans, the Baduda, to enact the kind of civic virtue their idol advocates by orchestrating interventions in urban spaces. Additionally, gatherings on online social media play an important role in determining who is able to take part in these interventions. Specifically, access to Facebook via smartphones renders Baduda gatherings spatially complex, and opens them to various modes of performance, especially those by women. In tandem with other new communication technologies, personal digital devices can spark political energies, and possibilities for lower class collective organizing which, while highly vulnerable to commodification, flag new points of antagonism and realms of belonging to the low.
Empathy with the masses “There are three reasons why I have come to visit Slank again” declared Djoko Widodo at a press conference at Slank’s headquarters on 27 May, 2014, when the band announced that it was throwing its support behind the candidate. “The first is that Slank has been actively encouraging people to vote. The second is that Slank have been enthusiastic anti‐corruption campaigners. And the third is that Slank exemplifies the mental revolution. What’s the mental revolution? It’s youth being productive” (Jokowi‐JK 2014)
If ‘youth being productive’ was Djokowi’s best characterization of his key campaign slogan, then his need to rely on Slank to prop up his flabby verbal elaborations is startlingly clear,
5 and demonstrates the considerable political currency the band has amassed. But just what historical conditions enabled that amassing is a question that remains on the sidelines of mainstream political analysis.
Slank formed in 1983 but did not burst onto the commercial scene in Indonesia until 1990, when the band’s first album, recorded with a small label established by a graphic designer, Boedi Soesatio, Suit Suit He He, was released. Two of the songs off the album, ‘Memang’ (Indeed) and ‘Maafkan’ (Forgive Me) were enormous hits, causing Slank to repeat the formula of coupling fast‐paced jangly blues/rock with gentle love ballads in several albums thereafter. This formula appeared to succeed, for Slank’s first four albums won BASF awards for best selling albums in 1990, 1992, 1993 and 1994 (Anggraeni 2008).
The jangly blues/rock composition that featured in the band’s early years betrayed their fondness for the Rolling Stones, but it was also through these songs that the band fleshed out an image of itself as authentic, unmediated performance of simple, honest Indonesian rock, as the members adopted styles and persona suggestive of both the ‘everyman’, and an important trope of nationalist masculinity, revolutionary pemuda (youth), stereotypically portrayed as ‘raggedy‐clad’ and long‐haired (Peters 2009); Slank’s close identification with the term slengean (unkempt) called this figure into being. The band’s very name is derived from selengean, and ‘Mawar Merah’, Slank’s hit from the 1991 album Kampungan (lit. ‘Of the Slums’), concludes with the line “My face and clothes are unkempt, I don’t have a job, but I am sure she is happy, because she is my red rose” (Slank 1991).
In 1994, Slank released their fourth album and a new key term within the band’s lexicon – biru (blue) – which evinced autonomy and agency. They titled the album Blue Generation (Generasi Biru), and began to address their fans as members of such, inferring that the fans were not only unkempt rebels, as selengean inferred, but also an autonomous collectivity with particular visions and hopes for the future. According to principle composer and drummer Bimbim, the term ‘biru’ connoted Slank’s interest in imagining the host of new beginnings residing in the blue skies and blue oceans of the future tense (http://slankercommunity.blogspot.com.au/2009/01/filosofi‐logo‐slank.html).
I’m no chess piece/ I won’t be bossed around Don’t get in my way/ I’m the blue generation I want to think freely/ don’t force me Because I’m the blue generation Slank 1994
The commercial success of this vision coincided with the increasing visibility of a consuming middle class and the declining importance of the notional rakyat (the people) in national imaginaries. As Heryanto notes, during the 1990s, a “new bourgeois hegemony” began to
6 eclipse the dominant Othering of rich people as inherently un‐Indonesian. A new rich ideal emerged, which challenged negative stereotypes of the rich upheld in official versions of the national identity. “A central message in the dominant discourse about Indonesia’s economy in the 1980s was that ‘the rich are anything but us, Indonesians’ and that ‘we Indonesians are many things, but not rich.’ The rich were non‐Asian or non‐indigenous, non‐Muslim and non‐ rakyat. Since the 1990s, things have changed. The motto of the day has become ‘it’s cool to be rich’” (Heryanto 1999: 162). Slank’s performance clearly challenged this motto, and sought to reassert the moral superiority of the everyman. “Keep your money, take you Mercedes Benz away”, they sang. “Get away from my Red Rose. She’s mine.”
But while Generasi Biru can be linked to broader quests for social alternatives in the early 1990s, it should not be assumed that these quests articulated a naturally occurring frustration with ongoing state repression. In fact, in many ways they can be linked to state reforms, in the late‐1980s, of key institutions responsible for delineating Indonesian modernity, including television and recording. In fact, a number of acts advancing critiques of the wealthy and state officials thrived in this period, and this thriving cannot be interpreted as simply a reflection of the political mood. It is more aptly grasped as an effect of changes to the infrastructures responsible for pop’s mediation. In particular, the growth of advertising funded television, which prompted the expansion of the Indonesian pop industry (especially of its masculine band culture), and shifted the source of pop performers’ incomes away from album sales and towards television. As pop became increasingly prominent as a televisual presence, so did it begin to serve as an important site for negotiating post‐authoritarian nationality, as well as a prime source of content for television advertisements. As we shall see, such heavy reliance on television rendered pop musicians’ speech vulnerable to commodification and led, in the Slank case, to its ‘subsumption’ as a form of communication without commununicability.
Subsumption When Slank released their debut album in the early 1990s, they did so into a televisual environment that was rapidly changing in ways that expanded opportunities for performing Indonesian rock on television. In 1988, the government issued a decree that surrendered its monopoly over television. Between 1988 and 1995, four new private television stations were established (Sen and Hill 2000). As a result, opportunities for the televisual performance of Indonesian rock expanded considerably. For two decades, Aneka Ria Safari, the program devoted to pop music on the state channel TVRI, was the only televisual stage open to pop musicians, and rock musicians were barred from it. With the establishment of private television, a host of new music shows on television were added to local musicians’ performance repertoire. For the first time ever, in the early 1990s, Indonesian rock was being broadcast in televisual form (Sopian 2002).
7 This context can help account for the commercial success of Slank’s first four albums, and it underscores the fact that not only was Slank’s address new, so were the technologies that mediated it. The appeal of Slank’s selengean address, that is, does suggest a broadly antagonistic reaction to an emerging bourgeois hegemony. But it should also not be divorced from the emerging industrial force that afforded rock with fresh circulatory routes: advertising funded television.
At the turn of the century, in the wake of the fall of the authoritarian New Order regime, television expanded further. Between 2000 and 2002, a further five advertising funded television stations were established (Hollander, dHaenans and Bardoel 2009), and this had a profound effect on the size and sources of pop performers’ incomes. As television assumed a greater role in pop performers’ careers, incomes from live and televisual performance quickly began to exceed that from royalties, in the most extreme cases, by up to fifty fold (Djatmiko 2004). From this environment, a clutch of new Indonesian (all‐male) ‘super‐groups’ emerged, boasting unprecedented album sales of up to 2 million cassettes, and personifying what industry pundits quickly came to refer to as the ‘local music boom’ (Putranto 2009; Sopian, 2002).ii
The rising importance of television not only wrought changes to the bank balances of the performers in question, though. It also meant that Indonesian pop music and those who performed it were becoming an ever more visible part of a public sphere that people were struggling to imagine in new ways, after the fall of the New Order. It may not be surprising, then, that images of pop musicians and their lives became important sites for renegotiating the nation, its make‐up and its boundaries. This can be seen in the strong interest that emerged in producing new kinds of national history that revolved around pop, by way of tribute albums dedicated to Indonesian pop stars past and present, for example (Baulch 2012). But as well as historical revision, other kinds of performance also came to the fore, including those that fleshed out ethical and moral roadmaps for the reform process, or provided commentary on contemporary political problems.
Slank was a prime exemplar of the latter kind of act. In 1998, the year the Suharto regime fell, the band released the album Mata Hati Reformasi (The eyes and heart of the reform movement) (Slank 1998). Later, in 2004, Slank became increasingly politically active, undertaking, in 2004, a long march in major cities across the archipelago to encourage people to vote in the first direct presidential elections and releasing a song, ‘Lo Harus Grak’ (You Have to Act), which urged people to become politically engaged. In the same year, Slank and mounted a forceful anti‐corruption campaign resulting in the band’s appointment, in 2006, as ambassadors for the Anti‐Corruption Commission (Anggraeni 2008).
You have to act, you have to act, O my friend you have to act
8 God Willing, you will be victorious Advance! Advance! O my friend advance! Don’t be afraid, don’t retreat. My friend, advance! God willing, you will be victorious You may fail, but don’t hesitate It’s important to try. Come on, advance!
Slank 2004
By no means did such ethical and moral roadmaps exist at a distance from capital. For Slank and others, composing them in the early 2000s led to a host of lucrative endorsement deals in advertisements on television in the latter part of the decade. In context of increasingly rampant piracy with the proliferation of CD players, musicians ever more actively sought to secure such deals (Interview Wendi Putranto 2009). Iwan Fals, for example (a folk singer whose songs were widely used as anti‐Suharto anthems by students activist of the 1998 generation) appeared in 2008 in an advertisement for a brand of motor scooter, TVS (Suhendra, 2008). And in 2008, Slank appeared in an advertisement for a brand of instant noodles accompanied by the song ‘You Have to Act’ (Supermie, 2008). In 2009, the same song was used as accompaniment for an ad for the telco, Telkomsel (Iklan 2009). In the same year, Esia, a product of Bakrie Telkom that bundled network services with CDMA handsets, released a special Slank handset (Esia 2010). In 2014 and 2015, Slank featured in advertisements for a Yamaha scooter and a brand of snack food, So Nice (Iklan 2014, 2015). In 2014, the band endorsed Jokowi’s election campaign. After Jokowi won the election, Slank released a song, titled ‘Indonesia WOW, citing, on their website, inspiration from the consulting firm MarkPlus In: At heart Indonesia WOW was initiated by Hermawan Kartajaya, the Indonesian marketing expert and founder and CEO of MarkPlus.” (http://slank.com/potlot/indonesia‐wow/).
The transformation of ‘You Have to Act’ from a song into a jingle exemplifies what Dean refers to as the subsumption of democracy by capitalism, and suggests that online social media are not the only agents of such subsumption; this describes a more generalised process of commodification within neo‐liberal capitalism, digitally‐equipped and otherwise. To recap, Dean argues that rather than expanding the space for a critical outside, partiicpation in online social media contribute to its narrowing. By participating, that is, one does not mark out an alternative to the communicative capitalist machine, one feeds it: “What Jurgen Habermas theorised as communicative action does not provide a critical alternative to instrumental reason and the one dimensional society. It does not because communication has become a primary means for capitalist expropriation and exploitation” (2014: 4). The expropriation of participation, of communicative actiongives rise to what Dean refers to as communication without communicability: ”Unlike a message, which needs to be understood, a contribution is just an addition. ... As a contribution, each message is
9 communicatively equal to any other. What matters is not what was said but rather that something was said.” (Dean, 2014: 6).
The rendering of “You Have to Act” as a jingle can be read as an instance of the erasure of communicability – the rendering of a message as a mere contribution. A whole song has been disassembled, decommissioned as a vehicle for heralding democratic subjects, stripped down to its spark plugs, firing now to drive the pistons of post‐developmentalist myth making. ‘You Have to Act’ was no longer a rally cry, but a celebration of the value of temporal flexibility, autonomous individuality that so infuse the single use packet of instant noodles, scooter‐enabled moto‐mobility, and the cell phone.
Such disassembling certainly proceeds in a media environment in which the valorisation of neo‐liberal values envelops democracy, but not one in which participation in online social media played a prominent role. The commodification of Slank’s song was advanced by the growth of advertising funded television, suggesting that the dominant mode both precedes and exceeds the internet. Slank’s endorsement deals shed light on how this dominant neo‐ liberal mode comes to be, and how it comes to envelop democracy. The suite of products endorsed by Slank – telcos, motorbikes and instant noodles all feature in the top five ad spenders in the country (as do election campaigns) (Distribution 2013), and they also afford neo‐liberal values of temporal flexibility, mobility and individual autonomy material form. As ads on television for these products, accompanied by jingles derived from pop songs that explicitly address new democratic subjects, neo‐liberal values come to be foregrounded as prominent features of post‐authoritarian public culture. In such a condition, what space is left to be creatively antagonistic of the dominant? How is it possible to call for action without being subsumed by a television ad for Yamaha, Supermie or Telkomsel?
Developments in pop culture consumption associated with the rise of advertising funded television enable us to gain some purchase on these questions. In the 21st century, significant changes to the ways in which pop audiences are organized have resulted from the increasing importance of televisual performance to pop’s mediation. Pop fan groups have proliferated and, as we shall see, whilst these emerging forms of associational life facilitate the extraction of value from affective labour, they can also serve as organs for the reclaiming of neo‐liberal urban infrastructure (eg, motorbikes) to motivate an antagonistic spatial politics.
Fans In the above discussion we have seen how the ‘local music boom’ yielded a host of supergroups that sold an unprecedented number of albums and then, after digitization led to rampant piracy, began to perform in ways that lent themselves to televisual shows, as well as to product endorsement, from whence they quickly began to derive the bulk of their incomes. The expansion of television brought about changes in the content of pop performances, as discussed above, but it also brought about shifts in the ways audiences
10 were organized, as Indonesians increasingly began to consume pop as members of fans organizations. From the early years of the 21st century, the management of fan organizations had become part and parcel of pop music production (Baulch 2013).
As it happens, the organizing of audiences into fan clubs and the increasing importance of television to pop performance are closely interlinked phenomena. Fan groups can serve as a mobilizable public that enhances performers’ spectacularity at live and televised shows. This is why fans groups have become such an important part of pop production. They complement the growing importance of television and live performances to performers’ livelihoods. In a context in which appearance on television was becoming ever more pivotal to performers’ commercial success, such groups represented an army of fan labour that could be mobilized to perform (free of charge) as a loyal and enthusiastic audience populating the lip of the stage and televisual performances. Fan clubs serve owners of capital with convenient ways to extract value from audience members’ labor.
However, more than just a promotional tool, these armies of eager volunteers also represent a new kind of associational life mediating forms of co‐awareness elicited in the process of pop consumption. I contend that pop fan groups can be included in a broader kind of collective organizing that is beginning to coalesce around various consumer objects (such as the hijab, as well as pop idols) (Beta, 2014) and practices (such as urban farming) (Ardianto, Aarons and Burstein, 2014), and that are playing vital roles in delineating virtuous, ethical forms of consumption and civic life. Indeed, my research among fans reveals that the opportunity to appear on television was not the only factor motivating them to join such groups. As well as televisual fame, and the thrill of getting front row seats, many fans, speak of their fandom as a moral and ethical endeavor, and corporeal affinities occupy an important place in these endeavors.
Hinson’s review of Dean is usefully invoked here in order to grasp the implications of fan groups’ proliferation for the operation of agency within post‐Fordism. While Dean contends that the heightened value of circulation over signification evacuates symbolic fields by which people can build political belonging, Hinson points out (with Lazzarato), rather than relegating communicability to never‐ending exile, each instance of deterritorialization enables new kinds of reterritorialization – the re‐signification of that which has been emptied out: “In Deleuzo‐Guattarian flavor, the deterritorialising of subjectivity on the one hand always produces a re‐territorialisation of different subjectivities” (Hinson 2014: 6).
It is significant in this context that Slank played a pioneering role in establishing the fans group as a pivotal part of pop production and consumption. The band established its fans club in 1998, and since then the Slank fans club has become recognised as the largest and most fervent of the many that now honeycomb the contemporary public sphere. With 75000 members (known as Slankers), and more than 100 branches across the country, this
11 perception may well be accurate. But the quantitative significance of Slank’s fans group is not important here; of interest, rather, is the way in which its establishment precipitates a dialectic within the Slank phenomenon. We have seen above how Slank’s critical address can be understood as a televisual phenomenon, and this rendered it vulnerable to commodification. However, it also prompted the organizing of Slank’s audience as a fan group, and this had the effect of reterritorialising Slank’s address. As Anggraeni’s study of the Slanker’s Fan Club shows, fans regard their community as a selengean mandala centred on the principal members’ residence at Jalan Potlot, Jakarta. Fans undertake pilgrimages to Jalan Potlot, where they are routinely received as audience members bearing witness to Slank swanning around shirtless, in ripped jeans, sharing their meals with fans, eating their rice with their hands – performing, in other words, the selengean address (Anggraeni, 2008). Anggraeni cites such moments as pivotal to fans’ testimonies about their enthusiasm for the Slankers’ community, and this affirms Hemming’s point about the disruptive effects of affective labour. Drawing on Hardt, Hemmings argues: “while affective labour is the hidden centre of capitalist accumulation, since it remains unremunerated yet is what bestows qualitative value, it also produces emotional connections that threaten to disrupt that accumulation” (Hemmings 2005: 550).
Slank used a dedicated newspaper, not online social media, to herald the Slankers as a distinct public. While Slank and the Slankers is a largely pre‐digital phenomenon, the part new media technologies play in territorializing pop performers’ address of the lower classes comes into sharp focus through examination of Slank’s ‘successor’, Nanoe Biroe. As mentioned, Nanoe Biroe’s performance is very much inspired by that of Slank. By coining the term Baduda to describe his fans, Nanoe Biroe clearly draws on Slank’s celebration of the ordinary man’s moral elevation. Moreover, he has, on at least one occasion, shared a stage with the band at a provincial show, at which he dueted with the band’s vocalist Kaka, echoing his lyrics, but in Balinese, in a revealing exhibition of how his performance generally provincialises Slank. Unlike Slank, however, the Nanoe Biroe phenomenon is very much inflected with new communication technologies. His heyday coincided with the popularization if mobile phones and motorbikes and, as will be discussed below, these technologies lay out the very tools for the production of fresh symbolic fields and forms of belonging to the low. Rather than erase communicability, they work to refashion the ways people move and gather, speak and connect, and to present as a social alternative.
A social alternative Nanoe Biroe began his career as a pop musicians with Biroe band, whose name he later adopted as his own on beginning his solo career. With Biroe band, Nanoe Biroe won first place in the East Indonesia division for the Surabaya rock contest and went on to record an album with renowned producer Log Zhelebour. It was not long, however, before Nanoe Biroe left Biroe band and struck out as a solo artist in 2005. His first solo album Suba Kadung Metulis (It’s Written Now), was produced by Balinese label Jayagiri Production and sold
12 handsomely (Nanoe Biroe, 2005). In the same year, he established the Baduda (dung beetle) fan club. Balinese youths’ affinity for this club quickly became visible all over Denpasar. Nanoe Biroe had designed a tee shirt, featuring his face enframed by the words ‘President of Baduda Republic’ and they became an ubiquitous feature of the cityscape (Muhajir 2014).
As he began playing around the island after the release of his debut album, Nanoe Biroe quickly became known for his easy and charismatic stage style. At shows, he intersperses his songs with a flowing banter, made light with a liberal dose of wisecracks and puns, but firmly tethered to his assessments of contemporary social ills and his suggested remedies for them. He affects a gentle, priestly style, but one packed full with a sense of fun, and this unusual combination has the effect of drawing his audience in and making them feel as if they want to get close to his words. Nanoe Biroe’s moral message makes specific linguistic interventions into Bali’s current ethno‐religious revival through his playful use of low Balinese. In songs like ‘Menyama’ (Togetherness) and ‘Timpal Sujati’ (True Friend), Nanoe Biroe preaches the high value of togetherness and friendship in a tone hotly scornful of conspicuous consumption and material wealth (Nanoe Biroe 2012).
Nanoe Biroe’s elaboration of this social alternative is very much enabled by his playful use of low Balinese, of which the coining of the term Baduda to describe his fans serves as a good example. The word emerged in context of a push for a return to fundamental Balinese values, following the 2002 bombings of night clubs in the tourist district, Kuta, which caused hundreds of fatalities, and resulted in a downturn in the Balinese tourism industry, including widespread layoffs.iii This push could be seen in the rising use of the term ajeg (stable) in public discourses of Balinese‐ness. According to Palermo and Allen, the notion of ajeg Bali can be glossed as generally connoting a desire to return to village (agrarian) values, a concern with the declining Hindu population on the island, and manifested in the increasingly visible display of symbols of ethno‐religious identity. Its key mediators were various kinds of high culture, such as intellectuals with university links (who convened and participated in seminars dedicated to defining ajeg Bali), the high form of the Balinese language (which increased its role in in public discourse as it began to articulate as radio, print and television news), and the regional newspaper, the Bali Post (which frequently devoted considerable page space to papers presented at the abovementioned university seminars) (Allen and Palermo 2003).
Ajeg Bali backdrops Nanoe Biroe’s performance, providing him with a frame of Balineseness to problematise and transgress. If ajeg Bali redrew the contours of a Balinese high culture by articulating it in high Balinese and mediated by universities, and the press, Nanoe Biroe pioneered fresh terrain for fleshing out a new kind of Balinese low. Nanoe Biroe’s performance intuits a cosmopolitan, horizontal orientation, forged through his proclivity for dirt and the low – his instinct for its material forms and for heralding it into being. During an interview, for example, he proudly bared his Nokia clone phone with a cracked screen – the antithesis, perhaps, to the technological sublime. And, as mentioned, his speech is exclusively articulated in low Balinese. On tee‐shirts his provocative words appear, in large
13 letters (as if they were being yelled) : ‘YOU’RE SO UP YOURSELF!”, announces one. “WHETHER YOU’RE RICH OR POOR, YOUR SHIT STINKS JUST THE SAME!”, proclaims another.
Deterritorializing and reterritorializing
When I went to live in Bali in 2005, I used to see Nanoe Biroe’s teeshirts a lot as I rode around on my motorbike. One particular design was prominent – that featuring Nanoe Biroe’s face enframed by the words ‘President of Baduda Republic’, mentioned above. I want to dwell for a bit on this design because it reveals much about the more productive dimensions of what Dean refers to as “communication without communicability”, and what Hinson, in his review of Dean, refers to as “’sense’ without meaning” (Hinson 2014: 6). Against Dean’s lamentations of the dire consequences for democracy of the erasure of communicability, Hinson argues, with Lazzarato, that if neo‐liberal capitalism expands space for ‘sense’ while restricting communicability, then this can have the effect of creatively dismantling capitalist subjectivities, and producing new ones: [For Lazzarato] the process of desubjection can be seen as welcomed and necessary step in overcoming capitalism….While the level of social subjection provides us with the unities that have traditionally formed subjective centres around which leftists have organized, such as “worker” and “class”, they are also products of a specifically capitalist division of labour. It is in this sense that the process of desubjection through the deterritorialization of signs offers the potential to dismantle capitalist subjectivities. Hinson 2014: 6
Let me now consider the design in question, starting with the image of Nanoe Biroe’s face.
caption: Nanoe Biroe appears as Che, President of Baduda Republic
The first thing to say about this image is that it is hypermedial. It makes no claims to reveal
14 something beyond the image, it is completely evacuated of context. What is being offered up here is the image’s captivating surface. It teases the viewer with its resemblance to other decontenxtualised icons: the face of Barack Obama, the face of Joko Widodo, the face of Che Guevara. Indeed, this image converses insistently with the well‐known image of Che Guevara. In another design, the same image of Nanoe Biroe dons a beret bearing a star – a direct reference to the image of Guevara.
Nanoe Biroe’s orientation to Guevara is interesting, because the image of Che Guevara that Nanoe Biroe cites demonstrates rather powerfully what Dean has to say about the loss of communicability within communicative capitalism. As Spyer and Steedly note, the much‐ reproduced portrait of Che Guevara’s face presents itself as, first and foremost, a media object. Stripped of both a contextual background and of the photograph’s grey tones, the image circulates frictionlessly, inserting itself easily into a variety of contexts not as a celebration of Marxism, but rather as an “uncluttered icon more than anything else” (Spyer and Steedly 2013: 21). Insofar as it cites the Che image, then that of Nanoe Biroe’s face in and of itself says little. What infuses it with meaning is its caption, especially the word Baduda. The face is evacuated of context, but the caption is heavy with it. It works to orient the face to a very specific, geographically delimited public. Together, the image and the caption work to both discursively construct Balinese members of a global ‘the people’ and to provincialize this category through a careful choice of low Balinese words.
The political significance of this mutual globalizing and provincializing can only be understood in light of the concerted efforts in the 1970s of the tourism industry, hand in hand with the anti‐communist New Order regime, to convince Balinese that they were anything but members of a global the people. Several scholars have documented well the deep material, spatial and political impacts of the tourist gaze, and its longstanding role in shaping ideal ways of being that construct Balinese‐ness as unique, peaceful and unchanging. Vickers has discussed in detail how iconic representations associated with the tourist gaze reduce Balinese‐ness to a handful of gestures, poses and occupations: the topless beauty, the dancer, the woodcarver, the painter, the ceremonial procession, for example (Vickers 1989). Nanoe Biroe hovers left field of this repertoire, and calls on young people to venerate a Balinese‐ness that is being pulled in new directions. We see Nanoe Biroe’s hypermedial face being enframed in various ways, but never by stereotypical symbols of Balinese Hindu observance or exceptional artistic ability. Rather, he dons a Che beret, and orients himself to dung beetles. By doing so, he calls into being a Balineseness that belongs to a kind of global commons.
In order to assess the effect of neo‐liberal capitalism on belonging, however, it’s important to extend the focus of enquiry beyond how signs move in and out of meaning, and to include consideration of the ways new communications technologies order how bodies circulate, and how they assemble. The President of Baduda tee shirt design, after all, did not sit still. In
15 Appaduraian terms, it enjoyed a most vibrant social life: it circulated incessantly, and an examination of the technologies that enabled its circulation brings to light two important points that Dean’s work on communicative capitalism glosses over. First, that online social rarely serve as stand‐alone expressive media for emerging forms of collective life – it inhabits broader assemblages, often only discernable through ethnographic research. An investigation of these assemblages can reveal both the hidden infrastructures of neo‐liberal capitalism and the extent to which these infrastructures lend themselves to the operation of agency. Second, uses of online social take place in a spatial context and necessarily introduce further complexity into that spatial context. Without an understanding of the time‐spaces of uses of online social media, we are impotent to assess its implications for critical forms of belonging.
Mobilising In interviews, fans identified wearing tee shirts as their preferred way of participating in Baduda fandom (Focus Group Discussion 2013). Indeed, most of the profits for the Nanoe Biroe brand come from the sale of tee shirts from his merchandise store in South Denpasar, U‐Rock, and not album sales or concerts. Using tee shirts to attach his speech to fans’ bodies, he animates it, send it buzzing around the streets of Denpasar. Of particular interest here are the machines responsible for mobilizing Nanoe Biroe’s speech. As it happens, the word Baduda burst quite spectacularly onto the streets of Denpasar around 2005, around the same time that there was a sudden explosion of young scooter riders in the city, due to the introduction of cheap credit regimes for purchasing Japanese scooters. Private ownership of transportation skyrocketed.iv Where previously there had been one scooter per family, now there were three or four. This altered patterns in the ways in which people moved their bodies in urban space, and opened new possibilities for the circulation of politically potent signs and messages.
As other writers observe, the increase in numbers of motorbikes on the road in the 21st century is not just a Balinese, but a generalized Southeast Asian phenomenon (Lee 2015; Truitt 2008). In Indonesia their popularization has advanced a break with linear narratives of state led modernity. People now self‐drive, dart into alleyways, navigate unconventional routes, thread dangerously around trucks, play cat and mouse with police – all at great risk. Motomobility also sees the forging of new ethical codes, rules, proper gendered conduct and kinds of assembly as motohumans become increasingly immobile, stuck in traffic. They also provide new opportunities for visibility and display – modification of these machines plays an important role in youth cultures revolving around them. Nanoe Biroe is well aware of new opportunities for display afforded by motomobility. Nanoe Biroe’s social media communications strategy is poorly conceived (Muhajir 2013), but his use of tee shirts to communicate lays bare his astute use of motorbikes – he very much capitalizes on a new generation of mobile men and women. As mentioned, many of his tee shirts bear enormous
16 words so to be visible on the road. Merchandise, in other words, afford Nanoe Biroe’s speech moto‐circulation, highlighting the political affordances inherent in people’s increasing embeddedness in technologies of mobility.
caption: high‐visibility messages in large print. This one reads: “Are you clever? I’m stupid and it doesn’t matter!! Better to be stupid than to be up yourself!”
“When people inhabit a city, they situate themselves and are situated through the intersections of infrastructure and technical systems”, writes Simone in his essay on Jakarta. “People figure themselves out through figuring arrangements of materials” (Simone 2013: 243). In seeking to convey how people both inhabit and are inhabited by the city, Simone explores the dynamics of territory: “a bundle of political technologies for measuring, administering and regulating the scope of what it is possible to do in the city” (2013: 243), and extraterritorial operations: “where an expanded notion of political technologies entails putting things into relationship so as to make contingent the use to which they have been put in the past, to open up spaces of contestation and experimentation” (2013: 244).
Nanoe Biroe’s marrying merchandise to moto‐mobility provides a good example of such extra‐territorial operations. Two political technologies are being employed extraterritorially in this case: merchandise and motorbikes. While merchandise is an increasingly common way for musicians to generate profit in an age of rampant piracy, Nanoe Biroe extends this use of merchandise by using it to circulate bold messages in the cityscape. Motorbikes, as argued above, can be read as a manifestation of the increasing value attached to individual autonomy. They help normalize the neo‐liberal condition. He, however, we see them employed as communicative machines, as sandwich boards for Nanoe Biroe’s speech.
Digital technologies, however, are by no means altogether absent from this scene. Although Nanoe Biroe’s social communications strategy is poorly conceived, Facebook is an important
17 medium for display and connection among fans, especially female fans, the Badudawati. As it happens, the Badudawati’s celebrate their embeddedness in motorbikes, and this is evident in the ways they fashion their profiles on Facebook. In the remainder of the essay, I want to turn to a discussion of how this and other digitally‐mediated Baduda assemblies suggest of the role mobile phones are playing in forms of lower class associational life emerging in context of an evolving neo‐liberal capitalism.
Menyama I
When I asked the Baduda what it means to them to be a Nanoe Biroe fan, they immediately invoked togetherness: ‘Menyama’, they consistently replied (Focus group discussion 2013). ‘Menyama’ is the title song from Nanoe Biroe’s seventh album, Timpal Sujati (True Friend). The appeal of menyama as a key word points to the Baduda’s strong attraction song texts, seen to delineate their communal identities and moral aspirations. When I asked them how they realise menyama in the course of their fan practice, they referred be to two time/spaces of Baduda coalescing, revealing how quickly their moral aspirations are translated into spatial practice. Both gatherings are, as we shall see, telling of how a new infrastructural matrix is prompting emergent forms of belonging and associational life.
The first of these gatherings took the form of a ritual Saturday night get together, which the fans cheekily referred to as a seminar, an acronym for (Semeton Minum Arak – palm wine drinking community. Twenty years ago, I observed similar gatherings, which took place in various spaces of the city – somebody’s house, in the gardu, in a cassette store, or in a community radio station. Invariably, such gatherings were overwhelmingly masculine. Attendance at them required little capital outlay, and rather than those with money, they centred on those with musical and rhetorical abilities, and relegated others to a kind of onlooker status referred to as bengong: a silent kind of openness.
Observing the seminar, it became clear to me that while musical and rhetorical performance remain an important part of the gathering, but being bengong is a thing if the past. So was the overwhelmingly masculine character of the Saturday night drinking session. It is true that female fans, the Badudawati, remain on the peripheries of the seminar, but their presence there still suggests that the gendered‐ness of key time/spaces at which national or provincial identity is redrawn, is coming undone. Those on the peripheries of the seminar – mostly women – are not silent and open, but busy and preoccupied with their phones. When I asked the women what they are doing on their phones, they claimed to be issuing shout outs to peers not in attendance, or uploading photos of the gathering to facebook. In this way, smartphones can be seen to decentre the gathering, introduce spatial complexity, and open it to various modes of Baduda performativity. Armed with their phones, the women are able to be present at both the overtly masculine seminar, and the more feminized Badudasphere on facebook, affirming Lim’s arguments that online performances and interactions do not transcend time/space power relations, but fragment them, producing new kinds of spatially
18 bounded power contests (Lim 2014)
When we turn our attention to the women’s performances on Facebook, we find that the plot of spatial complexity thickens considerably. Above, I referred to facebook as a feminized Badudasphere and indeed, when I hooked up with some of these women on Facebook, I discovered that they took their careers as Badudawati very seriously, adopting the word Baduda or Nanoe Biroe album titles as their profile names, clearly taking pride in their visibility as Baduda. GektuSukma, for example, presents a stable Baduda identity, consistently wearing an array of backwards baseball caps and an assortment of black tee shirts. So, although Nanoe Biroe’s social media strategy is poorly conceived,v Facebook is an important medium for display and connection among fans, especially female fans, the Badudawati. Badudawati may be marginal to the core Baduda ritual, the Seminar, but on facebook they appear front and centre, frequently wearing tee shirts bearing the word ‘Seminar’, as if to reclaim this time space as their own. In one post, Putu Tomboyz leads a phalanx of Badudawatis dressed in various Nanoe Biroe designs – Gektu’s Seminar teeshirt stands out. On Facebook, these women cannot be overlooked or silenced. They demand attention.
But it’s not just by enabling a to‐ing and fro‐ing between the masculine offline and feminized online spaces that smartphones afford temporal and spatial complexity. The Badudawatis’ uses of facebook also display a dialogic relationship between other new mobile communications technologies and this particular form of mobile media. Facebook is being used as a forum to experiment with representations of mobile bodies, for the Baduda very much celebrate their embeddedness in motorbikes. This is clear from the ways in which the Badudawati interweave themselves with motorbikes in their bodily fashionings on facebook. In several posts, Gektu dons the kind of face‐mask people wear to reduce fume inhalation while on their bikes. In several others, she wears a motorbike helmet, or has it positioned close by. Similarly, Putu Tomboyz poses as a mobile motohuman in her profile pic, on a seriously modified machine. Gektu also shares news posts about lost and found motorbike licences, and items informing people how to change the name on their motorbike registration. These posts afford a sense of the material forms implicated in the administration of motorbike‐riding public, and how these material forms are drawn into people’s everyday, including their social media profiles.
19
caption: Gektusukma poses with her motorbike helmet
caption: lost motorbike registration shared by Gektusukma
Menyama II The second event fans referred me to when I asked them how they realize menyama in the course of their fans practice took place on 13 August 2012, when Nanoe Biroe staged a concert on the filthy Badung River that runs through Denpasar. In later press interviews, he referred to the concert as a bid to focus authorities’ attention on the need to clean the river, but the show was also a publicity stunt that earned him a fourth listing in the Indonesian Museum of Records. Previous listings were earned for heaving the longest album covers, singing for eighty hours straight, and personally signing the most cd covers ever signed (TrashstockBali 2015).
20 Unlike Slank, who began to independently produce their albums as early as 1994, but then distributed and promoted themselves through traditional channels – music publishers and distributors, radio, television and concerts, Nanoe Biroe’s bizarre publicity stunts mark him as belonging to a different age, an age in which the Museum of Records is regularly used by established recording industry players as a promotional tools for acts they have signed. The band Wali for example gained enormous publicity when they were listed in the Museum of Records for selling the most ring back tones (Wali 2010). Wali, however, were able to achieve this record through strong backing from big capital institutions, such as televisual promotion and major label distribution. For someone like the independently produced, provincial Nanoe Biroe, entry into MURI requires an ability to pull off stunts such as these. But the concert reveals not only aspects of the new media environment Nanoe Biroe inhabits, but also important dimensions of Nanoe Biroe’s and the Baduda’s shared civic vision, in particular their orientation towards infrastructural repair, especially at the city’s margins and borders. At another gathering, for example, the Baduda pooled their energies to paint degraded footpaths In the city square.
caption: Nanoe Biroe stages a concert in the Badung River
In interviews, fans recounted their attendance at these events, especially the river concert, as seminal experiences in their careers as Baduda. It was being was being in the river, getting wet and splashing around that had altered them in new ways. When asked how they came to know of the concert, fans said they had received an sms broadcast from Nanoe Biroe’s management team informing them of when and where the concert was to take place. Nanoe Biroe’s concert on the river, attendance at which had so significantly altered many of the fans with whom we spoke, had been entirely promoted by sms broadcast (Focus group discussion 2013). In my interview with him, Nanoe Biroe’s store manager and brother affirmed this. He showed me how, on purchasing products at U‐Rock, consumers’ mobile phones numbers are diligently recorded in an exercise book at the cashier, then transferred to a data base, from
21 whence they call forth and mobilise shoppers at intervals, in the form of sms, to spectacular events that transform them as Baduda.
This mode of addressing consumers is not unique to Bali or to Nanoe Biroe, but what makes it significant to a study of how the Baduda attain social distinction are the particular meanings attributed to sms in Indonesia, and how, by extension, uses of sms position people in a social hierarchy. When I asked Man Danoe why the management team preferred sms over, say, twitter or Whatsapp, as a way of heralding fans, he replied that twitter was ‘too confusing’, and that sms was simpler, more direct, and easier to use, indicating patterns of antipathy and affinity for particular media forms. I contend that these antipathies and affinities are shaped not by the technical capacities of each application, but rather the discourses that shape them as distinct cultural forms, discourses that are accentuated by the advent of smartphones. In contemporary Indonesia, however, sms is infused with a decidedly lowly flavour – as the realm of the rough, the vulgar, the direct. Ferdiansyah writes of how subalterns use sms to code their speech, and this causes urban elites to reinvoke class distinctions in relegating such coded speech, and the medium that affords it, to the realm of the uncivilized (Ferdiansyah 2011). Sms is a consistent theme in songs rendered into the stereotypically vulgar popular music form, dangdut. Readers of the Bali Post send their messages to the editor, for publication in a special section titled ‘sms’ in rough, critical tones reminiscent of Nanoe Biroe’s speech.
Wallis has found in her study of mobile phone use among working women in China, that people are often empowered to be literate in and have access to certain kinds of mobile affordance by virtue of their elevated position in society, and the Baduda and Nanoe BIroe’s preference for sms supports Wallis’ contention (Wallis 2013). However, there is also more to it, as Nanoe Biroe’s use of sms to herald lowly publics suggests. Sms do not just disempower people by marking them as low. They also throw up resources for the production of counter‐ publics (Warner 2002).
Conclusion
Most of this essay has been preoccupied with the notion of communicative capitalism, and how the Slank and Nanoe Biroe cases affirm, challenge and extend Dean’s arguments. With Dean, I have argued that a kind of communicative capitalism subsumes pop musicians’ critical speech, but qualified that in the Indonesian case the development of neo‐liberal, information‐abundant capitalism precedes and exceeds the internet. Against Dean, I have argued that new communicative technologies do not relegate communicability to ever after exile. A more optimistic perspective on possibilities for new forms of critical belonging within neo‐liberal capitalism is afforded when we are attuned to the productive dimensions of deterritorialization, the broader assemblages online social media inhabit, and the spatial implications of specific engagements with online social.
As well as having implications for scholarship enquiring into scholarly investigations of
22 political agency within post‐developmentalist capitalism, the study also extends current work on digital democratization in Asia. After the initial optimism about the promise of digital uptake for expanding freedom of expression in Asia, recent works have begun to proffer much more cautious assessments of the democratizing impact of social media. For example, taking the Arab Spring as a queue to enquire into the relationship between political mobilization, censorship and the deliberative public sphere, Abbot’s special issue explores in detail how activism and democratic discussion grows in or is hampered by particular regime types (Abbott 2013).
This article does not take issue with the approaches or findings of these works, but strives to demonstrate the utility of alternative starting points and approaches. Rather using the gatherings at Tahrir Square to mobilise an enquiry into the political impact of social media in the Indonesian context, here I start by considering emerging forms of public life with significant political currency, and enquire into the role new media, broadly defined, play in affording that currency. The Baduda case shows, a study that focuses on collectivities that emerge on the course of everyday consumption places a different spin on political impact to one to one that attends to large scale activist mobilization. Using consumption as a starting point allows us to be more attuned to the broader assemblages, new kinds of mobility and the manipulation of space implicated in uses of new media technologies, and how such manipulations prize open opportunities for the cooking up of social alternatives. What we are seeing, then, emerge from this case is not a virtual public sphere of reasoned debate that prompts similar performances in real time and urban space, but a complex crowd of technologies that affords the genesis of new, critical modes of belonging. An infrastructural matrix of motorbikes, tee shirts and mobile media enables insurgencies intro urban spaces at various scales: the Saturday night drinking ritual, the street and, as I will discuss below Baduda gatherings at Nanoe Biroe concerts.
Indeed, articulations of class struggle emerging in the realm of leisure, of consumption, have always been as important as those emerging in the realm of work in enabling class subjectivities to function as a force for political change in capitalist Indonesia. Earlier in the essay, I discussed the Slank song, ‘Red Rose’ and mentioned the title of the album on which the song was included: Kampungan. I want to return to this album title now. As mentioned earlier, kampungan literally means ‘of the slums’, but it has a broader social meaning that can only be grasped as a relationship to the term gedongan, literally, ‘of the buildings’. These terms exist, that is, in dichotomous and mutually defining relationship to one another. By mapping not only positions of centrality and marginality to the metropolis, but also relations to particular kinds of musical sounds and other media forms (eg, print vs cassettes), kampungan‐gedongan signifies vulgarity‐refinement (Baulch 2014).
Although primarily emerging out of the New Order era of state‐led modernization, kampungan and gedongan endure as political resources, the manipulation of which has been variously enabled by media ecologies in a constant state of reinvention. This paper has been
23 primarily concerned with the manipulations of kampungan that proceeded through periods of media deregulation and digital uptake, that is, after the Cold War state‐led modernization era that originally the term as denotative of the masses in a new capitalist society. It has considered representations of the masses and modes of heralding them, the cultural and media forms used to do so, as well as the new ways the masses assemble and their gendered dimensions. Slank rose to fame in which Indonesian pop performances and recordings were becoming more abundant, and finding it easier to achieve commercial success by way of album sales. Through a combination of lyrical and sartorial play, Slank bent rock to address a new audience; not the middle classes it had exclusively addressed in the 1970s , but the masses. Slank developed a rock‐inflected address that cast the masses as inhabiting a realm of virtuous consumption, in contrast to the conspicuously consuming middle class.
As we have seen, such celebration of the masses’ virtuousness developed as an elaborate moral philosophy delineating scenes of the post‐authoritarian possible and laying out formula for ideal horizontal solidarities. I’ve also argued that these elaborate moral philosophies were by no means distance from the development of media capital. In fact, they developed as valuable commodities in a context in which television and advertising was expanding, and the New Order state was in demise. In the latter part of the 1990s and early 21st century, Slank joined a number of other supergroups in advancing an emerging cultural nationalism that quickly emerged after the New Order fell, and as media industries were expanding and changing. This cultural nationalism not only greatly enhanced the value of pop performers’ political speech, it also furnished them with new ways to extract value from fan labor, by establishing fan associations. In the case under consideration here, we see new idol/ intellectuals, Slank and Nanoe Biroe, adeptly navigating the architectures of contemporary urban life (teeshirts, motorbikes) in their attempts to both articulate their visions for an ideal public sphere and extract value from fan labor.
For fans, these groups are alluring not just because they hold the promise of affording ordinary people proximity to power. They also serve as a new kind of lower class associational life that throw up resources – such as the key words composed by idols/intellectuals – for negotiating a place for the masses in a fast changing political landscape. And they afford fans an ability to undertake this negotiating in the process of pleasurable consumption. Moreover, just as idols/intellectuals adeptly navigate urban infrastructures in order to extract value from fan labor, so do fans make good use of new media to expand stereotypical representations of the masses and their gendered dimensions. In the Baduda case, for example, smartphones disrupt in significant ways the core ritual of ‘mass’ masculine solidarity – the Saturday night drinking session. By virtue of smartphones, women enter this ritual and display themselves in aggressive and forthright ways as valid members of the emerging mass public sphere and as architects of its
24 intertwining with the infrastructural resources that the city throws up, demonstrating an advanced level of what Lee refers to as “infrastructural aptitude” (Lee, 2015).
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Discography
Slank. Suit Suit He he. Project Q, 1990
Slank. Kampungan. Project Q , 1991
Slank. Generasi Biru. Piss records, 1994
Slank. Mata Hati Reformasi. Slank Records, 1998
Slank. PLUR. Pulau Biru, 2004
Nanoe Biroe. Suba Kadung Matulis. Jayagiri Productions, 2005
Nanoe Biroe. Matunangan Ajak Dewa. Jayagiri Productions, 2007
Nanoe Biroe. m3tamorforia. Jayagiri Productions, 2009
Nanoe Biroe. Matur 5uksma, 2011
Nanoe Biroe. Timpal Sujati. Baduda Productions, 2012
Interviews
Wendi Putranto, editor, Rolling Stone Indonesia. 26 June 2009
Focus Group discussion with nine Baduda fans. 29 September 2013.
29 Man Danoe. Store manager, U‐Rock, Denpasar. 14 December 2015.
i The essay is based on research undertaken between 2004 and 2014, as part of successive post‐doctoal appointment and with the assistance of two Australian Research Council grants. As a post‐doctoral fellow with the Indonesian Mediations Project at Leiden University, I undertook a study of the Indoensian pop music producers (including Aand R executives, performers (including Slank), managers and music video producers) at the height of the local music boom. Some of the material discussed here, especially that pertaining to the local music boom, draws on that research. As an Australian Post‐ Doctoral Fellow funded by ARC DP DP0984681” Middle Classes, New Media and Indie Networks in Post Authoritarian Indonesia” and led by Professor Ariel Heryanto, I undertook a series of interviews with music journalists, some of which I have also drawn on here. As lead research on the ARC DP DP130102990 “Mobile Indonesians: social differentiation and digital literacies in the 21st century” with A/Prof Jerry Watkins and Prof Ariel Heryanto, I undertook a study of pop fans and mobile fans, aided by a large team of Indonesian researchers. The section on Nanoe Biroe draws on interviews and observation undertaken as part of that project. The discussion of Slank’s history and development draws on library research undertaken in 2014. ii As Sopian notes, In the late 1980s, the rock band God Bless’ Semut Hitam album sold record‐making 400,000 copies, but 1999, Indonesian rock groups such as Padi Sheila on 7, Jamrud, Slank and Dewa began to enjoy sales of 1‐2 million cassettes. iii On 12 October, 2002, two bombs were detonated, first inside Paddy’s Pub and, twenty second later, outside the adjacent Sari Club in the tourist district of Kuta. Two hundred and two people died, and 209 were injured (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Bali_bombings accessed 4 November 2016) iv In 2000, total annual motorcycle sales in Indonesia amounted to 864,144 units. By 2011 the figure was approximately 8.05 million. Between 2002 and 2005 sales increased by more than 100% (2002: 2.29million; 2005: 5.07 million) (http://www.aisi.or.id/statistic/ accessed 4 November 2016). In a 2016 Financial Times article, Lockett cites Indonesia as “one of the world’s largest markets for motorbikes” and states that “[i]n 2015 Indonesia accounted for 70 per cent of all motorcycle and scooter sales among the five nations tracked by the [Asean Automotive] federation (excluding Vietnam, another major market)” (Lockett, 2016). The five nations tracked by the federation included Indonesia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia. v As a research assistant on this project, Anton Muhajir undertook a study of Badudas’ social media uses over a two week period in October 2013. Based on a combination of Badudas’ self‐reporting he found that Baduda favored facebook above all other social media platforms. Muhajir’s observation of activity on Badudas’ facebook page revealed that they rarely engaged with any of Nanoe Biroe’s severasl ‘official’ facebook pages.
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